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1) listening
' Zahra Fayaz ' Listening ''' Listening is the ability to accurately receive messages in the communication process. Listening is key to all effective communication, without the ability to listen effectively messages are easily misunderstood – communication breaks down and the sender of the message can easily become frustrated or irritated. Listening is not the same as hearing. Hearing refers to the sounds that you ' ' hear, whereas listening requires more than that: it requires focus. Listening means paying attention not only to the story, but how it is told, the use of language and voice, and how the other person uses his or her body. In other words, it means being aware of both verbal and non- verbal messages. Your ability to listen effectively depends on the degree to which you perceive and understand these messages. Listening involves observing body language and noticing inconsistencies between verbal and non-verbal messages. For example, if someone tells you that they are happy with their life but through gritted teeth or with tears filling their eyes, you should consider that the verbal and non-verbal messages are in conflict, they maybe don't mean what they say. Listening requires you to concentrate and use your other senses in addition to simply hearing the words spoken. the way to become a better listener is to practice “active listening” this is where you conscious effort to hear not only the words that another person is saying but more importantly try to understand the complete message being sent. Listening involves a complex process that allows us to understand and interpret spoken messages in real time by making use of a variety of sources such as phonetic, phonological, prosodic, lexical, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic. it plays a key role in developing learners’ L2 communicative ability. In contrast to Chomsky’s (1965) view of language as a mere formal system governed by a series of rules, Hymes (1971, 1972) argued the need to pay attention to language use in social practice. Thus, he introduced the term ''communicative competence'', which incorporated not only internal aspects of the language, '' '' such as its grammar, but also the rules of language use in social context. The core of the communicative competence is the listening skill since it is the manifestation of interpreting spoken discourse and a way of manifesting the rest of the components. In such a process, listeners play an active role in which activation from the rest of the components included in the proposed framework (i.e., linguistic, pragmatic, intercultural and strategic) is necessary to achieve overall communicative competence . listening located at the core of A) linguistic competence B) intercultural competence C) strategic competence D) pragmatic competence . '''Discourse competence '''implies an understanding of how language operates at a level above the sentence. It involves knowledge of discourse features such as markers, coherence and cohesion as well as formal schemata in relation to the particular purpose and situational context of the spoken text. Thus, if listeners have to recognize and interpret what is heard in longer or interactive discourse, they need first to understand which discourse features have been used and why, and then relate them to the communicative goal and particular context of that piece of discourse. listeners will be able to know how the different parts of a given spoken text relate to each other at the discourse level,what they mean and, in short, keep communication running smoothly in a meaningful way ( Scarcella and Oxford 1992). '''Linguistic competence includes all the elements of the linguistic system such as aspects concerning grammar, phonology and vocabulary ( Celce- Murcia and Olshtain 2000). Knowledge of these features is necessary for listeners to decode a given spoken text. On the one hand, listeners’ grammatical knowledge enables them to apply the rules of morphology and syntax to recognize the inflections on words as well as understand whether the sentences being heard are cohesively and coherently well formed. On the other hand, mastery of the phonological system is also fundamental in the listening comprehension process, since listeners need to know not only how words are segmented into various sounds, but must also understand aspects such as rhythm, stress, intonation, feature detection or metrical segmentation (see Rost this volume). Additionally, knowledge of the lexicon or vocabulary is an essential part of listeners’ linguistic competence, since it is the means to recognize the words that are heard within a whole piece of spoken discourse (see Rost, this volume, for the importance of lexical knowledge and lexical access ). Pragmatic competence involves an understanding of the function of a spoken utterance in a given situation. Thus, in order to interpret the speaker’s actual intended meaning when producing a particular utterance, listeners need to be aware of the situational and participant variables as well as politeness issues implied in such utterance. it has been claimed that if listeners recognize the specific communication situation where a given spoken event takes place (i.e., a formal lecture, an introduction between strangers or a casual talk among friends), they can be ready to listen for what is expected in such a situation (Scarcella and Oxford 1992). Intercultural competence implies having knowledge of both cultural and non-verbal communicative factors in order to appropriately interpret a given spoken text. Thus, listeners’ background knowledge of those cultural aspects will help them construct its meaning as well as acknowledge differences between their own culture and that of the target language so that possible misunderstandings can be avoided. Additionally, the knowledge of non-verbal means of communication, such as body language, facial expressions or eye contact, also plays an important role in the appropriate interpretation of a given spoken text. Listeners’ awareness of those elements will provide them with important clues that enable them to improve their communicative ability when listening. the intercultural component is related to the discourse competence since knowledge from both cultural and non-verbal means of communication would allow listeners to increase their overall communicative competence strategic competence involves both communication and learning strategies that will allow listeners to successfully construct meaning from oral input. (strategies ' ' ' ' competence) Learning how to listen : What should the learners be listening to? ' ' ' ' ''' The material that the learners should be listening to should be ''spoken English'''. All too often the listening that learners are exposed to in their listening classes is written English that has been recorded. Such material fails to demonstrate many of the features that characterize the spoken language. being written language, it tends to contain sentences that are much more complex with much more subordination than is normally encountered in spoken language; and the language has a tendency to be stilted or even “dated”, as compared to spoken language. Moreover, being recorded written language, it is often somewhat formal as compared with real spoken language. There are some factors that should be borne in mind when selecting what the learners will be listening to : 1) ''Needs analysis: '' '' '' The material needs to be relevant to the needs of the learners in question. This can only be determined by “needs analysis” and then, as far as possible, ensuring that the material chosen is as relevant and useful to these particular students as possible. Part of the problem lies with the way programs are often structured, and decisions as to what materials are to be taught are made by administrators or senior teachers ahead of knowing who the learners are going to be. An additional problem in many English as a Second Language (ESL) classes in particular, is that the needs and aspirations of the students in one class vary greatly, making it very difficult to accommodate everyone’s needs in the same course. 2) Motivation: '' '' '' '' There is also the problem of boring the students: '' ''for example one for computer programmers, in which such meticulous care was taken to use only material highly relevant to that group’s needs, that the course became boring to the students and they complained .To avoid boring the students, the highly relevant material needs to be peppered with other, different types of material in order to break the tedium and at the same time to expose the students to other types of language. Such an approach makes space for humorous, general interest, and other listening as well, which enhances motivation something that should be consciously and deliberately worked at ''all the time. '' '' '' '' '' ''3) level of difficulty: '' '' '' '' '' Sometimes, we become so involved with issues of authenticity and relevance of the material, that we lose sight of the dimension of level of language difficulty. While analyzing need is much more talked about at the present, diagnostic testing of proficiency level is at least as important, if not more so. A large part of the teacher’s role in improving L2 listening skills is to sensitize our students to the potentially useful signals, cues and other sources of help available to them in the spoken forms of the language. '''How to become a good listener? ' Language learners often make the mistake of thinking that all their difficulties in listening are due to their inadequate knowledge of the target language, but that is only half the story; native speakers can be bad listeners if they are bored or tired, for example. As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, listening is not only transactional (listening for factual information) but also interactional (involving listening for the purposes of social interaction), which in turn involves empathizing with speakers and really trying to understand why they are saying something. Both L1 and L2 listeners may need to use listening strategies when their listening skills fail, such as inferring words which are unfamiliar or have been missed, asking for clarification and predicting. Some of the activities you could use here are: - Asking students to think about the different meanings which the word “listen” could have -Telling a story but coughing at certain points so that students have to ask for clarification of the missing information or guess what it was. - Asking students to think of people they know who are good listeners ,and getting them to compile a list of the qualities shown by a good listener. - Designing their own listening course. - Planning how they can do listening practice outside class. What kinds of listening skills and strategies do we need to help our students to develop? - understanding short utterances on a literal semantic level. Involves knowledge of phonology, stress, intonation, spoken vocabulary, spoken syntax. - understanding longer or interactive discourse. Involves knowledge of discourse features such as markers, cohesion, schemata. - understanding the function/illocutionary force of an utterance. - interpreting utterances in terms of the context/situation. Involves knowing how different socio- linguistic groups use language, so involves knowledge of dialects, cultural references, degrees of formality, power relations and so on. - resolving comprehension problems by seeking help from the speaker. - remembering input, monitoring and evaluating how well one is understanding. 'Some ways of improving the teaching of listening: ' - Choose what they listen to. - Make their own listening texts. - Control the equipment (being in charge of replaying difficult parts of the listening text, for example). - Give the instructions. - Design their own listening tasks. - Reflect on their problems in listening. Teachers should create listening tasks in which language learners make conscious use of both top and bottom as they try to understand what a speaker is saying. The levels at which spoken information is potentially available for interpretation include phonetic, phonological, prosodic, lexical, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic. At the bottom-most phonetic level, partners in a conversation in English need to monitor the sub-lexical signals of their interlocutor’s attitude to the current topic and what is being said about it, for example, Hm , '' '' '' '' Hmhm ''and ''Uhuh ''. They also need to assign the intended meaning to these briefest of comments, which have different socio-pragmatic associations; this is no easy matter for non-native listeners (Gardner 1998). The conventional way of describing the use made of the internal and external resources available to listener is to group them into ''bottom-up ''and ''top-down ''processes. In its strictest sense, bottom-up processing would involve piecing together the elements in the speech signal in a linear fashion ,in real time, as it is being spoken and heard Top-down processing is broadly the converse of bottom-up, emphasizing the listener’s use of their existing knowledge of topic and the relevant context in forming hypotheses as to the speaker’s meaning and, when appropriate, in modifying them to match new incoming information . A key issue for the teaching and testing of L2 listening skills is the relationship between top and bottom. • ''TOP : '' '' In top-down processing we rely on what we already know to help make sense of what we hear. Schemata, the relevant packages of prior knowledge and experience that we have in memory and can call on in the process of comprehension, are of two types: content schemata ''and ''formal '' '' '' ''schemata .''Content schemata are networks of knowledge on different topics, for example, "cooking,” comprising knowledge gained from a range of sources and also personal experience. When we hear someone talking about a topic that we are able to link to an existing content schema, then we find comprehension very much easier. Formal schemata are derived from our knowledge of the structure of discourse genres, e.g., an academic lecture, a sermon. • ''BOTTOM : '' '' '' When trying to recognize L2 speech, learners use the characteristic patterning of their L1 as a mental template for identifying incoming words. When listening to an L2 we initially transfer the same metrical expectations as we attempt to segment speech; only at relatively advanced L2 levels do we seem to be able to suppress these L1-based segmentation strategies and to adopt that of the other language (Dejean de la Bâtie and Bradley 1995). English represents a particular difficulty for L2 listeners in this respect because it is one of the languages that allows polysyllabic lexis, which features words embedded within others. For example, in addition to its own 11 words, the sentence “''Milo went to a teaching conference last August in Caister, near '' '' '' '' Norwich” contains (in my non-rhotic Southern English idiolect) the phonetic forms of at least another two dozen words: my, mile, low, tour, teach, each, chin, chink, in, ink, con, for, an, store, '' '' '' '' or, Augustine,stink, (ink), case, to, encased, an, ear, Ian, rich. ''Although this is a contrived example, the point remains that embedded forms of this sort are a common feature of spoken English; according to Cutler (1997), as many as 85% of the polysyllabic words in English contain embedded words, which represent potential phonetic distractions to the L2 listener struggling to recognize English speech. '' '' '''Conclusion : ' ' ' ' ' Listening to a second language (L2) has been regarded as the most widely used language skill in normal daily life (Morley 2001; Rost 2001).listening gained a status of significant and central importance in language learning and teaching over the last decades. In such a process, listeners’ active participation has been highlighted, and the influence of linguistic, psychological and cultural factors has also been described. accessibility of input, top down processing, bottom up processing, and listener status have a direct impact on L2 listening instruction.